evolutionary genomics

Color vision as we know it resulted from one fortuitous genetic event after another.

In addition to serving as a set of instructions to build an individual, the genome can influence neighboring organisms and, potentially, entire ecosystems.

Conservationists are reintroducing large animals to areas they once roamed, providing ecologists with the chance to assess whether such “rewilding” efforts can restore lost ecosystems.

An organization hopes to restore natural ecological processes by reintroducing large herbivores to the continent.

An analysis of the transcriptomes of several fruit fly strains reveals dozens of possible de novo genes in each.

Comb jellies take their place on the oldest branch of the animal family tree.  

Biologists have struggled for centuries to properly define what constitutes a “species.” They may have been asking the wrong question—many smaller organisms might not form species at all.

Beaks did it for Darwin. Now, monitoring real-time evolution of bacteria that infects finch eyes reveals repeated, rapid evolution of an emerging avian pathogen in backyards throughout the U.S.

By sequencing the genome of a 700,000-year-old horse, researchers have pushed back the time of DNA survival by almost an order of magnitude.

Intrepid Norwegian explorers discovered the Antarctic icefish, a marvel of evolution, while venturing to an island at the bottom of the Earth in 1927.

A bizarre group of Antarctic fishes lost their red blood cells but survived to tell their evolutionary tale, revealing a fundamental lesson about the birth and death of genes.

Carl Woese, the discoverer of the third domain of life, has passed away at age 84.

In pondering genome structure and function, evolutionary geneticist Laurence Hurst has arrived at some unanticipated conclusions about how natural selection has molded our DNA.

Gene expression controlled from afar may have spurred the spurt in brain evolution that led to modern humans.